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1 TOOLS OF UNDERSTANDING

In the Pirke Avot, or "Ethics of the
Fathers," a popular tractate of the Talmud, one finds a list of objects that God
brought into being as the sun set on the sixth and final day of creation.[1] These include the modus operandi
for many of the miracles that the Lord would later display
before humankind­--for example, the well of the Earth that swallowed Korah and his
followers, and the
mouth of the ass that spoke to Baalam in the desert. It was as if, as sunset approached,
and God knew that He was finished with the task of creation, He endeavored to bring into
existence everything that might be needed later on. At the end of this list of
necessary items is a curious addition: the first set of tongs, for, as the Talmud tells
us, tongs can only be made with other tongs.

The idea of
a tool that can be made only from another tool, and that is itself a toolmaking tool, lies at the heart of this
book. My immediate concern is the phenomenon
that theorists have called ideology, but my larger subject is human cultural
understanding. I believe that the study of ideology must be dissolved into this larger concern. We must break
down what previous thinkers have called ideology into distinct and
analyzable mechanisms. We must replace the
study of ideology with the study of diverse ideological effects produced by
human thought, effects that together produce the phenomenon called ideology. At
the same time, we must expand the concept of ideology by absorbing it into the more general study of cultural understanding.
So we must proceed in a dual movement: dividing ideology into its
variegated mechanisms, and viewing these
mechanisms as special cases of the ordinary processes and operations of human thought.

The metaphor of the toolmaking
tool unites these two gestures. The study of ideology is the study of tools of
human understanding produced in, by, and through human culture. It is the study of the cumulative
creation of these tools through the use of previously existing tools of
understanding, and the study of the consequences of this recursive manufacture. To
understand ideology we must understand the tools of human understanding--with
respect to both their advantages
and their deficiencies, their intended and their unintended con­sequences, their ability to
empower us and their ability to exercise power over us.

Ideology
is a much-contested
term these days.[2] Some social theorists think that it has outlived its usefulness, particularly
given its historical connections to the
Marxist tradition and Marxism's many internal disputes. They prefer instead to talk about discourse, episteme, habitus, tradition, language
game, inter­pretive community, and
a host of other terms for characterizing the social nature of human thought. Each of these terms has a
slightly different meaning. Each justifies
its particular stance by a different theory. Yet each points at the same basic
set of issues--the socially generated and socially sustained ways in which human beings understand and constitute their
world. And regardless of the particular
terminology used, each of these approaches produces different ver­sions of a
theory of ideology. When I speak of "the theory of ideology" in this book,
I refer to their collective concerns. As I shall stress repeatedly, the dis­tinctive problems faced by a theory of ideology do
not vanish when we change our focus
to concepts like discourse.

Ideology and the Philosophy of
Culture

The theory of ideology, like the
study of discourse associated with postmod­ernism, has always been part of a larger endeavor--the
philosophy of culture. The ancient Greeks distinguished between physis, the world of nature, and nomos, the world of convention, law, and
culture. The philosophical study of nomos includes ethics and political theory. But it also
includes culture itself as a
philosophical problem and an object of study.

The
philosophy of culture has a rich tradition and many illustrious fore­bears, of whom Vico, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel are
perhaps the most prom­inent. Some of the questions the philosophy of culture
asks are these: What is the relationship of
culture to human existence and human history? What role does culture play in producing the faculty of human
reason? Is human history, and hence
the history of culture, a tragedy or a comedy, or is it a story with no determinate end and no narrative coherence or
unity? Later philosophers, like Marx and Nietzsche, emphasized a further
question: the question of power. What power do culture and cultural forms have
over individuals? How can individuals recognize this power, and what, if
anything, can or should they do about it?
The study of discourse, like the study of ideology, is merely the latest in a series of approaches to the
philosophy of culture. The basic questions it asks are very much the same, and the problems it
encounters are very similar.

Although
people use the term ideology in many different ways, they are usually invoking one of two basic conceptions. The
first sees ideology as a worldview, an
intellectual framework, a way of talking, or a set of beliefs that helps constitute the way people experience the
world. In this conception, ide­ology
is a relatively neutral term. The second conception of ideology is dis­tinctly
pejorative. Ideology is a kind of mystification that serves class interests, promotes a false view of social relations, or
produces injustice. Alternatively, ideology
is a way of thinking and talking that helps constitute and sustain illegitimate
and unacknowledged relationships of power. It is a form of dis­course in which oppressive power finds its home.[3]

This book
offers a third position. Both the neutral and the pejorative con­ceptions of ideology describe
different aspects of a deeper phenomenon. They describe effects produced by the tools of human
cultural understanding. I call these tools of understanding cultural software. Hence my theory of
ideology is a
theory of cultural software and its effects.

Oppressive
discourses, worldviews, belief structures, and mystifications all arise from the diverse tools of
human understanding. The components of cul­tural understanding include beliefs
and judgments. But they also include cog­nitive mechanisms that help produce and fashion beliefs
and judgments. These cognitive mechanisms
include, among other things, heuristics for decision, nar­rative structures and social scripts, conceptual
homologies (A is to B as C is to D),
metaphor and metonymy, and methods of ego defense. Each of these cog­nitive
mechanisms can be beneficial and useful in certain contexts, but in others each can mislead and help produce or sustain unjust
conditions. The tools of human
thought are both helpful and hurtful, depending upon when and how they are used. Recognition of the simultaneous
advantages and disadvantages of our
tools of understanding--the inevitable connections between heuristics and
their limitations, between blindness and insight--is central to the argument of
this book. I call this the ambivalent conception of
ideology.

This
approach replaces both the neutral and pejorative conceptions of ide­ology. As in the neutral conception, we still study
how worldviews and systems of discourse are
produced. But we do this by investigating the diverse mecha­nisms of cultural understanding, and we do not
take a neutral or detached view toward their effects. Our tools of
understanding simultaneously enable and limit our understanding, empower us and
have power over us. When our cul­tural
software helps create or sustain unjust conditions, I say that it has ideo­logical effects. But our tools of understanding do
not always produce these effects. Hence ideology, in the pejorative sense, is not a phenomenon
separate from the general mechanisms of
cultural understanding; it is an effect produced by these mechanisms when they are placed in particular contexts and
situations. I retain the familiar adjective ideological to describe these contextually produced effects.

The metaphor
of "cultural software" proposes that we can compare certain features of culture, and of the
way that culture operates, to the software that is installed on a computer and that allows a computer to process
information. Simply put, cultural software
enables and limits understanding as software en­ables and limits a
computer. Although this can be a helpful metaphor, it can also be misunderstood. With this in mind, I want to
discourage two likely misinterpretations.

First, I do
not believe that the human mind works like any existing com­puter. Nor do I believe that
thinking is primarily a mechanical or algorithmic process. On the contrary, I shall
insist throughout my argument that human thinking is distinguished by its symbolic and metaphoric
character and by its fundamental
motivation in human values.

The growth
of cognitive science and the search for forms of artificial in­telligence have led naturally to comparisons between
human beings and com­puters. One of the most
important debates currently raging in the philosophy of mind is the
extent to which mind should be defined functionally in terms of information
states, like those in a computer. Some philosophers of mind have gone so far as to argue that the human mind
is essentially indistinguishable from
a computer, while others have asserted that the intentional nature of hu­man intelligence makes such comparisons thoroughly
inappropriate .[4]

Although these
debates are interesting, they are to a large extent peripheral to the concerns of this book.
Unlike most cognitive scientists and most phi­losophers of mind, I focus on the mind's
relationship to culture and not its ultimate structure.[5] Howard Gardner has noted that
although most cognitive scientists "do not necessarily bear any animus against the affective
realm, against the context that surrounds any action or thought, or against any
his­torical or
cultural analyses, they attempt to factor out these elements to the maximum extent possible."[6]It is quite
possible that the computational meta­phor of mind has encouraged this trend.
For these reasons, Jerome Bruner, himself
one of the founders of the cognitive revolution, has recently called for a renewed emphasis on "the concept of meaning
and the processes by which meanings
are created and negotiated in a community."[7] These concerns lie at the heart of this book; they
motivate my use of the idea of cultural software. I use this metaphor to illuminate the ways in which
human beings are constituted by and express
their shared values within a culture.

Second, the
idea of cultural software suggests an opposition to "biological hardware." But we cannot distinguish between
"hardware" and "software" in humans in the way we can for
computers. Each individual has a unique brain structure that is not merely the product of genetic
inheritance but is shaped and organized in part by her experiences and activities, especially those
in early childhood. As we are programmed
through social learning, our physical brain structure
is also changing. And the consequences of human beliefs and cultural activities
affect human populations and human bodies in countless ways. Thus, it is highly misleading to think of individuals
as consisting of identical hardware into
which identical copies of software are installed.[8]

The idea of
cultural software is not designed to suggest or defend a neat division between the cultural and
the natural. Rather, it directs our attention to the know--how that is part of
every human being and
that is shared by
and transmitted
between human beings through communication and social learn­ing. This know--how
is our cultural software. The ability to communicate and engage in social learning and thus pass on cultural
know-how is an essential aspect of our
nature as human beings. The most remarkable result of human evolution is that it is in our nature to be
cultural. We are by nature cultural creatures.

To imagine ourselves as cultural
creatures is not to imagine ourselves as infinitely
malleable; this assumption misunderstands the ways in which culture grows out
of nature. The instincts and motivations that we have inherited from our genes are not abandoned or displaced by social
learning. They are refined and articulated, distorted and exaggerated,
extended and supplemented by ex­perience and social learning. What is made is
always made from materials al­ready given,
and its character and its limitations are shaped by those materials. In such a way the present is always made from the
past. We can fashion a purse from a
sow's ear, but it will be the kind of purse that can be so fashioned.

Yet at the
same time, culture has a cumulative power. The present can only be made from the past, but the
future can be made from the present. And so as culture is transmitted and transformed, it opens up
ever new horizons of human
possibility. In Chapters 2, 3, and 4, I shall argue that just as our biology has evolved through transmission
of genes, our cultural software is also evolving through cultural transmission--although in
importantly different ways and at much
faster rates. These genetic and cultural processes necessarily interact with each other; this interaction is only one of the
many ways in which the cultural forms
part of and is continuous with the natural world.[9]

Each human
being is born with the ability to absorb and communicate previously developed culture--to possess cultural
software and transmit it to others. Because we can make culture part of us, we
can be the living embodi­ments of previous
cultural development, just as we can be the embodiments of previous genetic evolution. And because we can do
this, we are also historical beings. We can absorb, reflect, and
transmit the cultural know-how available at
our particular moment in history. We can be the carriers of a certain kind of cultural software, the kind
present at our particular moment in history, and we can be the vehicle for its transformation into
the cultural software that will be absorbed by future generations. We can, and indeed we
must, stand in complicated
lines of inheritance and innovation. To be the bearer of a partic­ular kind of
cultural software, a configuration existing at this time and at no other, is what it means to be a historical being, to
exist historically.

History in
this sense is a peculiarly human phenomenon; the Grand Canyon changes over time, but only human
beings have history. Or more accurately, the Grand Canyon has a natural history, but only human
beings have a cultural history, which is history proper. Human beings begin to have history
only at the moment
when they enter into culture, which is also the moment that they begin to create collectively
shared and created tools for understanding the world and articulating their values.[10]

Culture and
cultural software are just such tools. They are tools used to make other tools.
This has always seemed to me the deeper meaning of the Talmudic story; for when
God created human beings on the sixth day of cre­ation, one of His final acts was to bequeath to
them a toolmaking tool, which is human culture.

For
simplicity's sake, we might distinguish three kinds of cultural tools that human beings use, keeping in mind
that they are difficult to separate in prac­tice. (Moreover, this list is not intended to be
exhaustive.) The first is tech­nology, the second is institutions, and the third is cultural know-how,
or what I call
cultural software. It consists of the abilities, associations, heuristics, meta­phors, narratives, and capacities
that we employ in understanding and evalu­ating the social world. An example of technology is a
computer. An example of an institution is
a bank. Examples of cultural software are knowing how to operate a computer, being able to dance the waltz,
or being fluent in a partic­ular
language.[11] Technology makes tools from
materials, institutions make tools from human sociability, and cultural software makes tools from
human understanding.

Although I have distinguished
them analytically, in practice these three types of cultural tools are necessarily interdependent and interrelated. The
institution of a bank, for example, may presuppose technology in the
form of buildings, computers, furniture, and
a workforce trained in a certain way, with certain un­derstandings and
abilities. The operation of technology requires know-how, and, conversely,
certain skills and knowledges often presuppose certain technologies (as well as
institutions already in place). Nevertheless, different philosophers of culture have emphasized some types of cultural
tools more than others. For ex­ample,
Marx emphasized the role of technology, and Vico emphasized the role of institutions. But the third type of tool--cultural
software--is equally important. Without
cultural software, our technology lies on the ground, rusted from disuse, and our institutions fall
apart. The biblical story of the Tower of Babel is a good example of what
becomes of technology and institutions without cultural software. Indeed, without
cultural software, social institutions not only cannot be maintained; they cannot even get
started.

Why
Software? The Problem of Shared Understandings

The motivation behind the concept
of cultural software is not the familiar desire to model the operations of the human brain on those
of the digital computer.
Rather, the point of this metaphor is to address and resolve a re­curring problem in theories of
cultural understanding: to explain how shared cultural understandings can be
shared while still accounting for the consider­able differentiation and
disagreement in belief among members of the same culture or interpretive community.

To show how
this problem arises, I shall use as an example Hans-Georg Gadamer's theory of cultural
understanding. Gadamer argues that human cul­tural understanding is made possible by our
location in a historically generated tradition. His theory is especially
attractive because it draws an important con­nection between historical existence and cultural
understanding. Gadamer em­phasizes that human existence is existence in history; to be human
means to exist in a historical tradition
and hence to understand within and by means of this tradition.

Because we
exist in a tradition, Gadamer claims, we bring certain prejudices or prejudgments to all of our
understanding. But these prejudgments, far from being hindrances to our understanding, are in fact
the preconditions of our understanding.[12] They enable us to understand not
only others within our own culture but people in other cultures as well. Thus, Gadamer asserts,
"Under­standing
always implies a pre--understanding which is in turn pre-figured by the determinate tradition in
which the interpreter lives and which shapes his prejudices."[13]

Gadamer
does not view his theory of tradition as a theory of ideology; nevertheless, it
provides an excellent starting point for my claim that ideology is a special case of ordinary cultural
understanding. We might think of the ideology
of Americans, for example, as a cultural tradition that shapes, directs, and
facilitates their understanding. The prejudices and prejudgments associated with this tradition color Americans' views of the
world and produce a distinctive take
on various political questions. Indeed, we might be tempted to substitute the
word tradition directly for the word ideology. We need only modify Gada­mer's comparatively rosy view of the effects of prejudgments and
prejudices on the understanding by emphasizing that these prejudices and
prejudgments can as easily mislead as
facilitate social understanding.The close connections
between ideology and the Gadamerian concept of tra­dition suggest the irony of the well-known critical exchange between
Gadamer and Jurgen Habermas.[14]Habermas worries
that Gadamer's theory of under­standing
does not sufficiently take into account the distorting effects traditionally associated
with ideology, when in fact Gadamer's concept of tradition can easily be adapted to provide an account of how
ideological thinking occurs. Con­versely, Gadamer insists that if
successful understanding ever occurs, it must occur
through a historically generated tradition with its prejudgments and prej­udices; yet through this argument, Gadamer
simultaneously demonstrates the inevitability
of ideological limitations on thought. In short, although Gadamer's account
of cultural understanding was designed to show how understanding can succeed, it also provides an account of how
cultural understanding can go wrong.

In spite of its considerable
utility for a theory of ideology, Gadamer's theory of cultural understanding
creates a series of puzzles. First, it is not clear what kind of entity a tradition is and how it is
possible to live in it. Where does the tradition
exist so that we are able to live in it? If we live together in a tradition, it is surely not in the same way that two people
live together in a house. Moreover,
Gadamer wants simultaneously to insist that the tradition we live in also inheres in us, so that we are both inside
it and it is inside us. In the alternative,
one might say that we share in a tradition; but do we share it like a
piece of clothing (which only one person can wear at a time), like a pie (from which we take separate slices), like a parent
(having a common causal origin), or like an experience (having been subjected
to roughly the same causal forces)? Finally,
even though we are inside the tradition and it is simultaneously inside us,
the tradition continues to exist after we (or any other individual) leave the community or die. Yet people are somehow also able
to bring their traditions with them to
new places after they leave their communities. To make sense of these
puzzles we must know what kind of object a tradition is, where it may be found, and where, if anywhere, it continues to
exist after individuals no longer
form a part of it. Stephen Turner has called these various kinds of difficulties the problem of location.[15] Note, however, that the word location is appropriate only because the metaphors generally
used to describe tradition are spatial in nature: we say that we live in a tradition, the tradition
inheres in us,
certain behaviors or persons are outside of the tradition, and so on. In fact, the problem of location is really a problem of ontology: it is the question of what kind of object or entity a tradition is, given
that we use these spatial metaphors to
describe it.

Second, Gadamer says that the
tradition is responsible for people having the
kinds of prejudices and prejudgments they have. By implanting these prej­udices
and prejudgments, the tradition facilitates and empowers our under­standing.[16] But Gadamer does not tell us exactly how the tradition does this. Gadamer believes that tradition
is disseminated through communication and language.[17] But that is only half an answer.
What exactly is the thing that is disseminated, and how does it have causal effects on human
intelligence? Turner
calls this the problem of transmission.[18] Once again, however, this expression reflects the standard
metaphors employed: We hand over traditions, we implant them in others, we transmit them. In
more general terms, it is the problem of causation--we need to know what kind of causal nexus exists be­tween the tradition and individual human
intelligence and/or behavior. More­over,
the question of causation is also the question of power, for it is the question
of how traditions can have power over individual minds. Indeed, a recurring
problem in theories of ideology has been some version of this ques­tion--the question of how ideas can have power
over people.

Third, if
tradition inheres within each individual in a culture and shapes each individual's apparatus of
understanding, why do individuals ever differ in their understandings of the same tradition? Why,
for example, do American constitutional
lawyers disagree about the meaning of the Constitution if all of them are part of the same constitutional tradition?
As Gadamer himself rec­ognizes, one
of the most interesting features of a cultural tradition is that its content and scope are always being tested and
contested by the individuals who live within
it.[19] Yet how is this possible if all
share in the tradition equally, or if the tradition inheres in each individual in the same
way? This is the problem of differentiation.
It is the flip
side of the problem of transmission or causation, and, not surprisingly, it is
sometimes neglected in theories that are trying to show how shared cultural
understandings are shared. Ironically, one of the hidden dangers that any
explanation of shared cultural understandings faces is that it will prove too much--that
it will explain more uniformity of thought, belief, and action than actually exists in a given
culture. Such accounts suppress the heterogeneity and dissensus that exist among the
cultural understandings of any group of individuals. To be successful, then, a theory of shared
cultural understanding
must show not only why understandings are shared, but also why they are not shared--why no
two people view the cultural world in exactly the same way, and why in any culture there are
always mistakes, misunder­standings, and disagreements. The standard response that differentiation
occurs because the tradition has unclear
boundaries does not solve the problem but simply returns us to the spatial
metaphor (a tradition has boundaries like a country).
Thus, it raises anew the questions of location and transmission, or ontology and causation--what kind of thing could a
tradition be for it to have unclear
boundaries, where is this thing located, and how is it transmitted into each
individual mind?

The problems of causation and differentiation, in
turn, are related to a final problem, the
problem of change or transformation. The tradition we live under today is not the same in all respects as the tradition
that existed two hundred years ago. The prejudices and prejudgments of one
generation are often dif­ferent from those of their children or grandchildren. Yet in spite of
these changes, the
tradition continues to be shared, although the content of what is shared has
become different. How does this change occur, what produces it, and how is widespread agreement among members of the
community preserved during this process? Solutions to these problems often
raise the problems of ontology, causation, and differentiation in new guises:
For example, if change occurs because of defects
in transmission of the tradition to individuals, the transmission must be
defective for all members in the same way if agreement is to be preserved on the terms of the newly
changed tradition. If change occurs through
individual differentiation, we need to know how agreement between individuals
was ever maintained in the first place and how it is now obtained on new grounds. So the problem of transformation
brings us back to the same old puzzles--what
kind of thing is a tradition that it can change or be changed in this way, what kind of causal efficacy does it
have over individuals, how is it
implanted in them, and how is it implanted in the same way?

Although I
have used Gadamer's theory of tradition to discuss these prob­lems, they arise for many different
types of entities and many different kinds of
social theories that purport to explain the existence and effects of shared social understandings. If we were to substitute
for Gadamer's "tradition" the idea of a "collective consciousness," an "Objective
Spirit," a "habitus," a "prac­tice," an "episteme," an
"interpretive community," or a "form of life," the same questions of ontology, causation,
differentiation, and transformation would arise again, albeit in slightly
different ways. Gadamer's theory of tradi­tion is one in a long line of approaches designed to show how shared
under­standings are shared. For
convenience, we may group these approaches into three basic types, which I call the supraindividual, the behavioral, and
the Kan­tian approaches.

The first
type of solution, of which Gadamer's appears to be an example, postulates a supraindividual entity that somehow does
the work of regulating or ordering the minds
of individuals. Examples would include Hegel's notion of an Objective
Spirit or Durkheim's notion of a collective consciousness. In these theories, a
single entity existing over and above individual minds guar­antees the shared nature of cultural
understandings. This entity may be a supra­individual consciousness or, in the
case of Gadamer's tradition, an entity whose nature is largely unelaborated. Not surprisingly, such theories create
puzzles about what the supraindividual entity is, where it resides, how it is
shared by individuals, what force it has over individual minds, and how disagreement
and disputes are possible.

A second solution turns instead to behavior. It asserts that shared practices of understanding are explained by the existence of
shared conventions of social behavior. The usefulness of this solution
depends on what sorts of things these conventions
are. If conventions are viewed as entities that exist over and above individual
minds, for example, they threaten to become just another version of an
Objective Spirit, a collective consciousness, or a tradition, and they face similar difficulties.

We might
try to avoid these problems by asserting that conventions are agreements to behave in similar
ways. Nevertheless, they cannot be conscious agreements, for most people never consciously
decide to adopt them. Alter­natively, we might insist that by conventions we mean nothing more than
reg­ularities of
behavior. Unfortunately, this solution leads to a problem of circularity. It is precisely these regularities of
behavior that a theory of shared cultural
understanding hopes to explain. The claim that shared understandings are shared by virtue of social conventions
explains nothing. Nor does this so­lution explain how disagreement and
differentiation are produced within con­ventions, for by definition such disagreements can occur only outside of
them, or at those places or in those
situations where social conventions run out.

Finally, an explanation of
shared conventions in terms of similarities of behavior shifts our attention away from cognitive processes of meaning
and understanding that must form part of each individual's conceptual
apparatus. When we say that participants agree, we have not yet
explained how they agree. Of course, it is an advantage of behavioral accounts
that they avoid questions about what the
internal mechanisms of cultural understanding are. Yet this advantage is also a disadvantage, for cognitive
processes of meaning and un­derstanding
surely must be involved in the creation and maintenance of shared conventions. So the problem with this kind of account
is that the solution it offers is just too
easy­­--it simply declares victory and goes home without ad­dressing the
most difficult questions of how cultural understanding is regulated, transmitted, and maintained.

Some
philosophers have tried to explain conventions in terms of similar or interlocking expectations. But these accounts cannot
be purely behavioral; to explain shared
understandings they must smuggle in the very sorts of concepts that raise the
problems I have noted above. David Lewis, for example, defines conventions as regularities of behavior; yet his
account depends on prior con­cepts
like "common knowledge" of a state of affairs, mutual expectations,
and individuals conforming to a
regularity. "Common knowledge," in turn, de­pends on certain states of affairs indicating the
same thing to everyone in a population.[20] The hermeneutical problems that I am concerned
with enter at precisely these points
in his account. Moreover, Lewis's account assumes that conventions solve problems of coordination based
on people's preferences. But not all
of the various types of shared meanings and beliefs that occur in a culture can be explained as solving
problems of coordination.[21] In short, con­ventions do not explain shared
understandings; they presuppose them.

A third
type of solution to the problem of shared understandings is Kantian in spirit.
According to this account, individuals within a culture understand the world in the same way not because
of the existence of a supraindividual entity that regulates agreement but because each possesses
an identical conceptual apparatus. Each
individual's mind is similarly constructed and employs identical principles of conceptual construction,
organization, and association. This com­mon perceptual and cognitive apparatus produces and guarantees shared un­derstandings.

I call this
approach Kantian because it postulates something akin to Kant's notion of a transcendental
subject. Although this transcendental subject is spo­ken of in the singular, it should
not be confused with a supraindividual entity. It refers to the common features found in the
subjectivity of all rational beings by virtue of their being rational.[22] Its grammar is similar to that
in the ex­pression
"the human eye," which refers to general features found in all normal
examples of this
organ. Similarly, talk about "the" transcendental subject refers to identical copies of a basic
conceptual apparatus.

Kant used
the concept of the transcendental subject to explain our under­standing of very basic aspects of the natural world,
but his idea can be extended much further.
For example, Edmund Husserl argued that the transcendental ego gave each
person the ability to comprehend eidetic essences and to perceive the world in
terms of categories. One can also recognize a similar motivation in Claude Levi-Strauss's concept of universal
structures of the human uncon­scious
that underlie all myths, or in Noam Chomsky's theory of a universal grammar that
underlies all human language.[23]

The most
serious problems with this sort of approach occur in accounting for the
differentiation of individual understandings and the transformation of shared understandings over time.
If we limit our focus to explaining our com­mon understanding of space and time in the natural world,
these issues do not arise so urgently. However, we are trying to explain how
people within a par­ticular
culture at a particular time share understandings that are partly different from those held by persons in
other cultures and times. Thus we need a sort of "historicized transcendental subject,"
a common hermeneutic apparatus that is similar for all members within a culture but differs
for people in different cultures and times. Yet in some sense this expression is a contradiction
in terms; for what
makes the transcendental subject transcendental is precisely its uni­versality and resistance to
historical variation.

One might attempt to avoid historicizing the
transcendental subject by ar­guing for the universality of a limited set of features of human thought
that explain some but not all features
and varieties of shared cultural understandings.

In
particular, one might retain a Kantian-style explanation of formal features of human cultural understanding,
while conceding that more substantive fea­tures are subject to historical variation. For example,
Levi-Strauss argued that although different cultures have different myths, the basic principle of
con­ceptual opposition is the same for all. Chomsky holds that although natural
languages differ in many respects, they all share basic grammatical features. Unfortunately, this strategy
leaves the basic problem unsolved. For we want to explain how shared understandings and substantive
agreements occur within various cultures
even though the nature and content of these shared under­standings and substantive agreements differ in
different cultures.

The great
strength of Kantian-style explanations turns out to be their greatest weakness--they can
guarantee shared understandings only so long as those understandings are unaffected by historical
change. However, once we concede that each culture and time has its own version of a
"transcendental subject"--a common conceptual apparatus that
guarantees shared cultural un­derstandings
within its boundaries but that changes over time--we immediately face the familiar problems of transmission,
differentiation, and transformation. Once history intrudes, we must
explain what mechanism guarantees that people within
particular cultures have roughly the same apparatus of understanding over time, and what causes this common apparatus
to change in more or less identical
ways for each person in the culture. The great advantage of supra­individual
and behavioral accounts is that they can be historical in a way that a Kantian
solution cannot. Yet they have their own difficulties in explaining the similarities (as well as the differences)
among individuals' understandings.

The theory that I propose seeks to explain what people
have traditionally called ideology as a
special case of shared cultural understanding. But as our discussion has shown, the concept of shared
cultural understanding itself needs serious
explication. To describe the phenomenon of ideology, we need some­thing like
Gadamer's concept of tradition, but we must alter it considerably to avoid
the puzzles that this and similar concepts produce. We need a way of explaining shared cultural understandings that
avoids the defects of the three approaches mentioned above while combining
their advantages. In short, we need
something

1. that exists in each individual;

2. that shapes and enables individual understanding and
cultural know-how;

3. that guarantees similarity of cultural understanding
and know-how while

permitting some variation, disagreement, and mistake
among individuals within the same culture;

4. that changes and develops over time; and

5.
that constitutes individuals as persons living in a particular culture at a
particular point in history.

The best way to describe this thing is as a kind of
cultural software. A copy of this software forms part of each person. Cultural software performs a
func­tion similar to
Gadamer's "tradition": it provides us with the tools and pre­understandings that enable us to
make judgments about the social world. Moreover, to the extent that people possess roughly
similar copies, their cul­tural understandings are shared understandings.
However, the theory of cul­tural software poses a different answer to the
problem of location. While it is not clear where a Gadamerian tradition resides, our cultural
software resides in
us, because it is literally part of us.[24]

Our cultural software is written and rewritten through
social interaction and communication. These acts result in an economy of
similarity and differ­ence
between the cultural software of different persons. This economy, in turn, produces convergence in cultural understandings as
well as individual differ­entiation. It
ensures that our cultural software is roughly similar to that of others in our culture even if it is by no means
identical in all respects. More­over,
through this economy, the cultural software of individual human beings evolves
over time. Our cultural software bears the marks and effects of previous development. It is the historical component of our
human existence.

Thus
what Gadamer calls tradition is not something that controls individual understanding but an effect produced by the
cultural software of many indi­viduals who have communicated with and thus
affected each other's cultural software
over many years. Saying that we "live in" a tradition means that we participate in an economy of cultural communication
with others who have (or have had)
roughly similar cultural software. Shared understandings are pro­duced by the
rough similarity of our cultural software, and regulated by our communication with others. Thus when we speak of
"our cultural software" we
do not refer to any supraindividual entity or collective consciousness. Rather, we mean only the collection of partly
similar and partly different in­dividual copies. In this sense, cultural
software is the historicized analogue of the
Kantian transcendental subject--it is a conceptual apparatus within each individual that prefigures cultural understanding
but that can also change and evolve
over time.

Cultural Software and the Construction of Persons

Behind this explanation of shared understandings lies
a further and deeper intuition that motivates
the metaphor of cultural software. Human beings are made of knowledge; we are the living embodiments
of information. Everyone knows that human beings store information in
their genes. And many people also know that
human beings store information in their immune systems. This information, produced and shaped by the body's
previous encounters with mi croorganisms,
helps it ward off future disease. But human beings also embody a third kind of information--cultural information.
We know things and we know how to do things because we live in cultures,
and this ability, this knowl­edge, is central to our existence as persons.

Our human existence
as embodiments of information, as bearers of cultural know-how, is the most basic
motivation for the metaphor of cultural software. The comparison between cultural software and computer
software encompasses two further ideas. The
first is that software is an indispensable tool for pro­cessing information and performing tasks. The
second is that software is an indispensable part of what we mean by "the
computer."

Let me
address these two points in turn. First, a computer needs software to process information. Without
this software it cannot do its job; it cannot interact with the environment
around it. If one boots up a computer without software, it just sits there and
does nothing. One can type on the keyboard endlessly, but the computer will not respond, or at best
it will spit out an error message. It cannot process information because it has nothing to process
in­formation with. At best its ability to
process information is primitive and un­helpful.
Only when we install software can it do anything useful, and even then the type
of information it can process depends on the kind of software installed on it. The most massive supercomputer, installed
only with a checkers program, still
can only play checkers--though it can probably play checkers very quickly indeed. The potential power of the computer remains
great, but its practical power is severely limited. As the power of the
software grows and develops, so too does the
practical power of the computer. In this way the potential abilities of the hardware are fully realized only through
the development of increasingly elaborate
software. Thus we might say in a very loose sense that software em­powers
hardware.

The second
point is that this software is, to a very important extent, con­stitutive of the computer, or
rather, what we unthinkingly call "the computer." Often what we mean by "the
computer" is really the software together with the hardware. So I say that I wrote this chapter on my
computer, but technically I wrote it using a
word--processing program installed on my hard drive. For most of us, then, what we mean by "the
computer" includes all the capacities made possible by the interaction of its hardware and software.

In human beings, of course, the
matter is much more complicated. A com­plex
interaction of cultural software, genetic predisposition, and environmental influences
creates the entity we know as the person. The physical structure of our brain itself is altered through the
acquisition of cultural skills during child­hood. If certain skills are not mastered by a point in our development,
the brain will not possess the
necessary equipment to produce them later. Hence the connection between
the biological structures of our understanding and the processes of social learning is closer in humans than
the relation of hardware to software in any
existing computer. We have evolved into creatures whose brain structure can be
transformed through the processes of social learning. This is yet another sense in which it is truly in
our nature to be cultural.

In order
for a computer's hardware and software to interact, both must have a capacity to process information. My word-processing
program allows my computer to process
information, but it can do so only because it is loaded onto another program, an operating system like DOS
or UNIX, that allows the computer to
process software. Thus the information processing permitted by the software requires a prior information
processor to employ it. Similarly, the
operating system can run only because the computer has a program in firmware--read-only modules attached to the
computer's architecture--that allows
the computer to understand and process the commands it receives from the operating system. Finally, this firmware can
operate only because the hard­ware of the computer allows it to process
the commands of the firmware at a mechanical level. So the distinction between
hardware and software in com­puters is not a
distinction between the part of the computer that processes information and the part that does not. Rather,
information processing occurs all the way down. In like fashion, we cannot say
that our ability to reason and evaluate
is purely a product of our cultural software. We are born with the ability to become reasoning beings. Rather,
cultural software articulates, sup­plements, and refines our powers of
reasoning and evaluation. Cultural software is
the historical component of human reason, not its sole component.

The relationship between hardware and software in
computers must be explained
differently. In theory, my word-processing program could be hard­wired into the computer. It could
become part of the hardware. But in practice it is more convenient for me to be able to remove
it from memory and sub­stitute different programs, or to upgrade the program that I have. This
is the great
advantage of software as an information-processing device. It is change­able and adaptable; it creates the
possibility of many different types of hard­ware/software combinations, and hence many different
types of computers. [25]Just as computer software allows
computers to harness their power, cultural software empowers human beings. The
human mind is a marvelous device. But like the most powerful supercomputer, it needs methods of
understanding if its power is to be
tapped. Our cultural software is the result of a long process of collective accumulation and construction. It
has produced elaborate tools of understanding,
which, in conjunction with technology and institutions, can be tremendously empowering.[26]

Of course, cultural software is empowering not only in
the sense of allowing us to achieve our goals. It also enables us to reflect on
and describe what our goals are. Cultural software allows human beings to
articulate and concretize their values, to
put flesh on the bones of their innate but inchoate urge to value and evaluate. Through cultural software our brute
sense of the beautiful is transformed into the many varieties of
aesthetic judgment, some of which come into
being and fade away at different points in history. Through cultural soft­ware the inchoate sense of good and bad is
transformed into the many varieties of moral and practical judgment, and the
many virtues and vices are articulated and
differentiated. Thus cultural software is the great enabling device not only of
human understanding but also of human evaluation. For this reason alone it is the greatest of human creations, the most
powerful and important of hu­man
tools.

Historical Existence and Cultural Construction

The theory of cultural software
is both a theory of ideology and a theory of historical existence. Gadamer's ontological
hermeneutics argues that to exist in history
is to exist in a historically generated tradition. But this answer simply
raises in a new form the familiar question of what a tradition is such that
people can exist within it. The theory of cultural software allows us a better
way of expressing this insight. To exist in history means to be the bearer of a
particular variety of cultural software that has been produced through a process
of cultural evolution. Thus historical
existence is not merely existence in time but existence at a time when one is constituted by a particular
form of cultural software peculiar to
that time. A person living in the sixteenth century has a different kind of existence from that of a person living in
the twentieth, a difference that is
due not merely to differences in climate and technology. Their genetic in­heritance
may be roughly the same, but their cultural software is quite different. And so the persons, who incorporate cultural
software, are different. It is this feature of human being that distinguishes
the existence of a person from that of
the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon exists in time, but only people exist in history, because only people are constituted by
an evolving, collectively cre­ated cultural software.

Like Gadamer's theory of tradition, the theory of
cultural software is also a theory of understanding, or, more accurately, of
the historical basis of un­derstanding. Human
understanding is understanding in history; it is made possible by tools
of understanding that bear the marks of their historical de­velopment. So there is an intimate connection
between historical existence and historical
understanding, between living in history and understanding in his­tory. To be human is to be constituted by a certain
type of cultural software that predisposes and facilitates understanding
in certain ways and not in others--a
cultural software that is the product of a certain history of conceptual bricolage and cultural evolution. This predicament
is both the meaning of his­torical
existence and the precondition of cultural understanding.

In this way,
the theory of cultural software takes literally the contemporary chestnut that individuals are
socially constructed. People become people only when they enter into culture, which is to say,
only when culture enters into them, and becomes them, when they are programmed with and hence consti­tuted by tools of understanding
created by a culture at a certain point in history. Through existence in history,
which is existence in culture, people obtain and incorporate cultural tools, and these become as
much a part of them as their arms and
legs.

The idea of
cultural construction is often associated with cultural deter­minism. But the theory of cultural
software suggests that this view is mislead­ing,
for cultural software empowers individuals even as it constructs and creates them. It untaps the potential power of the human
mind just as an increasingly complicated
and sophisticated software program allows a computer to do more. So we must understand cultural software as
constitutive not only of identity but
of autonomy as well. When we confuse cultural construction with cultural determinism, we misunderstand what culture does for
human beings. Culture is not a law of
obedience but the source of what we call freedom. Cultural software, rather than being the enemy of human
autonomy, is the very con­dition of
its possibility.

Although cultural software
empowers individuals, it also creates a certain opportunity for power over individuals who are constituted by it. It
does both of these things at one and
the same time, and through the same mechanism. The power that cultural
software makes possible is precisely the power that the tools of understanding have over the individuals who are partly
constituted by them. This power arises
in part from the limitations of our conceptual apparatus; this is akin
to the very powerful computer that has only a checkers program. Yet a second aspect of this power is more subtle. It arises
from the nature of information processing itself, and it is never fully
eliminated, no matter how
sophisticated the software becomes.

Processing information always
requires partiality and selectivity. As Hera­clitus
recognized, the world is in perpetual flux; we cannot comprehend its nature in all of its infinite diversity and
differentiation. Without some form of simplification, in the form of
categorizations, narratives, heuristics, or norms, it is impossible to understand anything at all. Information requires
simplifica­tion--taming the flux for
the purpose of understanding--and so at the very moment when understanding is made possible, partiality also emerges. I
often like to say that the key to
information is in formation; it lies in the selection and categorization
of the flux of experience into comprehensible categories, events, and narratives. In order to understand, we
must establish similarities and differences,
categories and narratives, canons and heuristics. These are the basis of all information, and hence the basis of
our cultural software. So our cultural software limits even as it
empowers. It informs us in forming us, which is
to say that it informs us in forming our selves as selves endowed with a certain form of cultural software, who see things
one way and not another, who are properly "tooled up" for some tasks
but not for others.

Thus cultural software has power
over us because this power is rooted in the
very way in which we are able to process information and articulate values. Of course, other individuals within our culture
can take advantage of the par­tiality of our cultural software. They can
gain power over us because we, like they, are
constituted by the tools of understanding. The most obvious example of this
phenomenon is the power of rhetoric and symbols. Rhetoric has power because understanding through rhetorical figures
already forms part of our cultural software. Symbols have power because
the associations that make them symbols are already part of us. So the study of
rhetoric or the study of semiotics may be
thought of as part of the study of cultural software, or, more properly, the
study of the traces and effects of this software. It is the study of the
building blocks of our understanding, and
therefore the study of the forms and modes of power exercisable over that understanding. At the same time it is part
of the study of reason itself, the culturally created reason that underlies our
everyday thought and action.

The theory
of cultural software rethinks the traditional conception of ide­ology in two ways. First, it sees ideological power as
the power that cultural software has over
the persons who are constituted by it, who are persons be­cause of it. Instead of seeing ideology in the
form of false beliefs held by subjects who preexist those beliefs, it
locates the source of ideological power in
the constitution of subjectivity itself. This subjectivity is not only the mean­ing that others assign to you but also the meaning
that you assign to the world itself through the shared tools of cultural
software.

Second,
the theory argues that ideology, or rather what replaces it--cultural software--must be understood not only through its
negative effects but also through its
positive ones. Cultural software does not merely obscure; it also clarifies. It does not merely limit the imagination
but empowers it as well. The theory
of cultural software thus rejects a uniformly pejorative conception that views ideology as a disease or a decrepit form of
human thought. In the theory of cultural software, the mechanisms of
ideological thought are the mechanisms of
everyday thought. In this theory, truth and falsity, deception and empow­erment enter through the same door.

[2]Indeed, from its inception the concept of ideology has always been
contested, and hence
the theory has generated many variations. Compare the variety of definitions offered in Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An
Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), 1-2.

[3] Here I am gathering together what proponents of a
discourse model deliberately wish to distinguish among. They focus on acts of
speaking, writing, and meaning rather than on beliefs. I have no quarrel with
the claim that thought, meaning, language, and action are inextricably related. My point is that a pejorative conception
of ideology has a particular interpretive attitude toward the object of its
critique, whether that object is belief
or discourse.

[5] I should note that the very attempt to divorce these
issues is itself controversial. See Gerald M.
Edelman, Bright Air,
Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (New York: Basic, 1992).

[6] Howard Gardner, The
Mind's New Science (New York:
Basic, 1979), 41. The same, I am afraid, must be said of much of the
most important and valuable work in the
philosophy of mind. John Searle is the most notable exception, but of course he
has also been highly critical of the
computational metaphor. See Searle, Minds,
Brains, and Science, 28-41. In fact, there is an important connection
between his critique of the computer
metaphor and his views about the study of culture. Searle has argued that what differentiates the study of the social
sciences from the study of the natural sciences is that the products of culture are the products of intentionality,
something he claims existing computers do not possess (82-83). Thus, at
least from Searle's perspective, it would not be at all surprising that work
employing the computer metaphor tends to bracket away questions of cultural
understanding.

[8]For an accessible discussion of brain physiology explaining why such a
simplistic hardware/software
model must be wrong, see Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire. More­over, the fact that human beings
exist in bodies is an important feature of how their cognitive tools emerge and develop. See Francisco J.
Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human
Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991); Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Can't Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence (New York: Harper and
Row, rev. ed., 1979), 235--55. The metaphoric and metonymic models described in Chapter 11 are premised on the importance
of embodied experience to human cognition.

[10]If the theory of
ideology is properly part of the philosophy of culture, the phi­losophy
of culture is also the philosophy of history, for it asks how people exist as
members of a culture in history.

[11] I distinguish the ability to speak a particular
language from linguistic ability in general. There continues to be considerable
debate among linguistic theorists concern­ing the scope and the parameters of
innate linguistic ability.

[21]As examples,
think of racist attitudes, or the cultural meanings of miniskirts. These examples of shared meanings are a far cry
from the classic examples of coordinating
conventions like deciding whether to drive on the left-hand side or the right­-hand side of the road. Ibid., 5-8. Moreover,
describing conventions as solving "problems of coordination"
puts altogether too rosy a glow on social conventions like slavery, or cultural associations of femininity with
submissiveness. As described more fully in Chap­ter 3, we must try to
understand how self-replicating conventions and institutions can be parasitic on the human capacity for sociability
and harmful to human interests.

[24] The idea of cultural software differs from the
Gadamerian notion of a tradition in yet
another way: Cultural software encompasses more than linguistic ability. It in­cludes
bodily skills that, although teachable through language, are not the same thing
as linguistic ability. These include the
ability to cook a souffle, play a musical instrument, or hit a baseball. Although Gadamer insists on the
importance of language as the medium of tradition, his formulation fails
to encompass all of the many different types of skills and bodily movements
that can be transmitted and reproduced in individuals, that con­stitute them as individuals, and that affect their
understanding of themselves and of the world.

[25]A hardware/software combination of this type is
sometimes called a virtual machine, because it uses the software to imitate
another machine that has a different hardware configuration or is dedicated to
a different set of tasks. For example, with the right kind of software, a
Macintosh computer can become a "virtual" IBM-compatible computer and
run some kinds of DOS-based programs.

[26] For an evolutionary argument describing how the
capacity to employ software might have developed in humans, see Daniel C.
Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 182-91. Dennett contends that
"software" transforms the hardware of the brain into virtual machines that perform various tasks (211). He
then argues that human consciousness
is the product of these hardware/software interactions (218).